The present invention relates to enrolling a user with a bill payment service.
It has become commonplace for individuals to use online bill payment services to pay bills. Moving bill payment online eased lives of individuals in many different ways. Paying bills online allows individuals not only switch from writing checks to issuing payment instructions online, but also to stay organized. For example, online bill payment services allow individuals to have a better sense of their personal finances. In addition, online bill payment services save a great deal of time. A person only needs to enter his account number and address the first time he pays the bills, and the service remembers all the information.
Setting up an account with a bill payment service, however, requires a user to provide a significant amount of personal information, such as name, date of birth, Social Security Number, as well as funding information (e.g., account number and routing number). Both authentication information and funding information are used by the bill payment service to check the identity of the enrollee and to eliminate a possibility of fraud. Typically, to achieve the first goal—verifying the identity of the enrollee—a bill payment service scrapes the enrollee's information from a web site of a financial institution for which an account number was provided and compares it to the information provided by the individual. If the authentication information is correct, the server authenticates the user and enrolls the user with the bill payment service.
To accomplish the second goal—checking the validity of the funding account—a bill payment service scrapes account information from the financial institution's web site using the user's ID and password provided by the user, thereby confirming that the user has access to the web site of the financial institution (and therefore to the accounts for that user ID). This approach has the well-known problem that users do not want to spend time entering a large amount of personal data to enroll with any kind of online service, including a bill payment service. In addition, entering account number and routing number is error-prone, which inevitably leads to data entry mistakes.